The study of terrorism requires interdisciplinary inquiry. Proving that terrorism cannot be the exclusive focus of a single field of scholarship, Borowitz presents this complex subject using sources based in religion, philosophy, history, Greek mythology, and world literature, including works of Chaucer, Cervantes, Mark Twain, and Jean-Paul Sartre. Terrorism for Self-Glorification, written in clear and direct prose, is original, thorough, and thought provoking. Scholars, specialists, and general readers will find their understanding of terrorism greatly enhanced by this book.

“Something spiritual, as well as actual, is broken in the world Joe Bonomo offers us, in this his first sustained collection. His response to what he is left with is to remake what he can in figures of comprehension and compassion. The size of his world is local and familiar, but that hardly prevents him from reaching into the silence or achieving, in finely-tuned language, his epiphanies. This is honest and lovely writing.”—Stanley Plumly

Ripperology—a sometimes obsessive interest in studying the crimes of Jack the Ripper—is a subject of timeless interest that has suffered from confusion, exaggeration, and hyperbole for over a century. Jack the Ripper was probably the first serial killer to appear in a large metropolis at a time when the general populace was literate and the press was a force for social change. The press was also partly responsible for creating many myths surrounding the Ripper.

“Kat Snider Blackbird gives us all these in her intense and passionate poems. She is a woman—and Woman—in love, in lust, and deeply in life. In her work, women will see themselves on all levels of being and men will at last be allowed to penetrate the mysteries of the women they love.”—Grace Butcher

The First Amendment of the United States Constitution mandates that government and religious institutions remain separate and independent of each other. Yet, the influence of religion on American leaders and their political decisions cannot be refuted. Leading Them to the Promised Land is the first book to look at how Presbyterian Covenant Theology affected U.S. president Woodrow Wilson’s foreign policy during the Mexican Revolution.

Biographer John Belohlavek delivers a work of importance and originality to specialists in the areas of mid-nineteenth-century political, legal, and diplomatic history as well as to those interested in New England history, antebellum gender relations, civil-military relations, and Mexican War studies.

Bodies and Barriers offers a collection of dramatic pieces of our time that provide an aesthetic perspective from which we view today’s vital health issues. With each play exploring a different medical crisis, the collection covers a range of issues common to a diverse population, irrespective of gender or race. Included are works examining how individuals confront the challenges posed by physical disability, aging, and terminal illness. These plays take as their subject the human form and its pathologies while providing a humanistic perspective from which to view men and women as they come to terms with a loss of physical and emotional well-being.

In 1999, Lisa Moore, one of Funky’s friends and a main character, discovered she had breast cancer. Batiuk, unsure about dealing with such a serious subject on the funny pages, decided to go ahead with the story line. He approached the topic with the idea that mixing humor with serious and real themes heightens the reader’s interest. Lisa and husband Les faced the same physical, psychological, and social issues as anyone else dealing with the disease.

An emergency physician and faculty member at Brown Medical School, Jay Baruch has long been fascinated by how illness can make people strangers to their own bodies, how we all struggle to maintain control as the body decays and life slowly becomes unrecognizable, and how health professionals discover and struggle with the limits of their own competence and compassion. In Fourteen Stories, Baruch doesn’t present a series of clinically based essays but a rich collection of short fiction that gives voice to a variety of people who, faced with difficult moral choices, find themselves making disturbing self-discoveries.

On June 2, 1854, crowds lined the streets of Boston, hissing and shouting at federal authorities as they escorted the fugitive slave Anthony Burns to the ship that would return him to his slaveholders in Virginia. Days earlier, handbills had littered the streets decrying Burns’s arrest, and abolitionists, intent on freeing Burns, had attacked with a battering ram the courthouse in which he was detained, leaving one dead, several wounded, and thirteen in custody. In the end it would take federal officials nearly 2,000 troops and $40,000 to send Burns back to Virginia. No fugitive slave would be captured in Boston again.